Bell Jars
by honeyblood
Summary: [AU; post-Chuunin exams; Sakura-centric; oneshot] She cuts her hair at twelve. At thirty-five it's long again. But there is a long way between twelve and thirty-five.


**Title: **Bell Jars

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto. I do, however, own a potato that looks eerily like him.

**Warnings:** This is a slightly disjointed, post-modern A/U on pretty much everything after the Chuunin exams. Pretend the whole "Sasuke leaving" thing never happened; I did.

**Foreword:** This is my first Naruto fiction, so please be aware that I have taken some liberties with some of the characters. Also, FFdotNET is messing with my formatting (which rouses my ire quite severely), so it doesn't look as pretty as it does in my Livejournal; if you want to see how it should look, it's in my memories.

* * *

_There was never any more inception than there is now,  
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,  
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,  
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. _

_**Walt Whitman/ song of myself**_

* * *

_The good times are killing me_

_**Modest mouse**_

* * *

1. 

You had long hair at eleven. At twelve you cut it off, in direst need. You let it grow again at thirteen, wanting to be one of those pretty girls that boys want to protect even if the idea leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

At fourteen your hair is nearly to your knees. Your mother is so proud of it-she braids and coils and plays with it as she would a dolls. Boys notice you, because you are pretty despite your private doubts. Sometimes you wish they'd notice you for something else; for being smart, maybe, because you certainly aren't the strongest.

You cut off all your beautiful long hair at fifteen because the thing inside your breast-the aching thing that's been clamoring at you since long before you can remember-that thing has snapped. You have robbed the princess of her hair, like Rapunzel after the witch cast her out, and part of you wonders whether you are the witch or princess.

Someone asked you why you did it, why you cut off all that lovely candy-floss colored hair. You want to be able to say something witty or something profound or even something shocking, but you can't because the truth isn't like that at all.

You have no idea how to explain the truth to them.

How do you explain that you got up one morning and you didn't like the girl you saw in the mirror at all; that you hated that girl who changes herself for the people around her-so eager to please, so eager to be liked. How do you explain that, like Rapunzel, you grew so tired of your tower that you would have done anything to get out?

So you killed her. Only, the person you left in her place is sort of a not-person, sort of a half-person. She has no individuality, no unique taste. She still likes all the things that she had before; cutting off her hair has done nothing but mutilate her locks. It doesn't change _her. _

You are still the ordinary girl. Still the girl who is always being saved.

You cut off your hair at fifteen, trying to cut off the person always needing to be saved. You want nothing to do with her, or the world she lives in. But you couldn't cut off that part of you that still wanted to get out of the tower.

* * *

2. 

When she is a child she is quiet and proper, a good girl. She wears pretty frocks and she lets her mother tie ribbons in her hair and she tries not to fidget during teacher's lectures but it's so _hard_ and she knows if she were to just try and aim her eraser she could hit the boy sleeping in the front row on the head, and wouldn't it be so _funny_ to see him start awake-

But she doesn't. Sakura doesn't because she is a good girl. A proper girl. One who doesn't dream of being the rescuer instead of the rescuee, and who doesn't want to play with the boys because they're more fun.

And she is a good little girl, even if she's not popular and even if she's teased about her forehead (which she doesn't _think_ is too big and it troubles her that it might be actually be abnormal so she takes to hiding it behind whatever she can and is teased all the more for it) and even if she has hair the color of cotton candy. So she cries bitterly when the other children tease her and keeps crying until another girl-a charming blonde little thing, more fey than girl-chases them away and offers her a hand, and a solution.

There has never been a ninja in her family, not her mother's side nor her father's. When she tells them, tells her rosy, mothering mother, and her chuckling bearded father, they are stunned-so stunned that they place no argument against her plans.

She hears them talking at night, hears them consoling each other that this is just a phase and it will pass.

That fall she enrolls in the gennin classes at the Academy.

* * *

3. 

The first boy to break her heart is not Sasuke. For all that she loves him, she has no illusions that he believes in her too much or that he will back her up if she needs support in anything other than a fight. No, he does not break her heart because he's already broken it several times over. By now she's already set aside a spare just for him to walk on.

No, it's not the brilliant Sasuke that makes her wish she'd died.

Kakashi breaks her heart when she is twelve-going-on-thirteen, and she never quite recovers.

Honestly, she never expected him to leave her behind. He's always been the one she counted on to-if not take care of her, per se-to at least be there for her. To be the one she can commiserate to about weather or her teammate's never ending bickering or about horrendous travel conditions. She believes with all of childhood's faith that this man will never leave and that he will be in the background forever, ready to bail her out when she gets in over her head. Sakura believes in him though fire, fog and fall.

Until he disappears with Sasuke, with poor tragic Sasuke, and she is left alone in a village of children and doddering old fools. For the first time in her life, she thinks she might not like Sasuke all that much.

The morning she wakes to find them gone, she thinks that she's dying because nothing else should hurt so much. Her insides tear themselves to bits and she chokes on too many tears. Up to this very moment, she didn't actually believe that Kakashi would up and leave her behind.

But he did and he has. He leaves her with nary a goodbye or a word of advice and it utterly kills her.

He himself has decided to train Sasuke, last of his clan. He finds someone for Naruto, scion of the kyuubi spirit.

But not her; she isn't worth the effort.

She is just too ordinary.

* * *

4. 

At fourteen she gives up on Sasuke.

"I want to be there for you but," she says and she feels a weariness sink deep in her bones. She is so much older than fourteen at the moment. She aches for him to dispute what they both know to be true; for him to tell her she's wrong. But she knows he won't. "I can't compete with Itachi."

"No, you can't," the boy she loves replies pointedly while missing the point entirely.

* * *

5. 

At fifteen she cuts it all off.

When she was twelve she cut her hair due to necessity. At thirteen it was long again, and she wore a red dress and black pants and she played with kunai and spells. She trailed behind the boys like the streamer of a kite; pretty, ornamental and kind of useless.

At fourteen her hair was down to her knees, and her mother loved to braid it, tangling silken ribbons in the rose-tinted tresses. Her mother had been so proud of it. She painted her nails and tried on high heels and attempted to affect a disaffected tone that didn't work out too well because she was too eager for everything.

So at fifteen she crops her hair close to her head. She cuts it so short that the satin ends curl at the base of her skull and the first time that Ino-pig sees her she mistakes Sakura for a boy. She goes home and cries for hours (even though she has promised herself that she is too old for tears now), and seriously considers if she has made a mistake.

The girl the mirror reflects back to her is still her, short hair and all.

At fifteen, she has come undone.

* * *

6. 

Fifteen is the age that Sakura breaks and the voice she reserves for her inner-most thoughts starts to slip out in her everyday use.

Rebellious-or maybe just desperate-she puts a thick streak of red in her hair (it turns sort of magenta, and she worries that it doesn't look daring enough; she wants to get away from being that sweetheart, that rose-haired girl), and discards her red dress for brighter, darker colours. She finds that she likes fishnets and mesh-both fabrics breathe nicely in the summer heat.

Shortly after she cuts her hair, she gets inspired and pulls a kimono out of her closet. She slices it to pieces and then fits them back together with safety pins string and anything else she can get her hands on (when her mother sees the disfigured robe she shrieks and rages and acts more distressed than when Sakura's hair was shorn). The result is oddly macabre and oddly pleasing and so she slips on some jeans underneath the mutilated robe and wears it out. She fills with sour pride at the looks she receives and she blows off training for the first time ever.

So what if Kakashi has abandoned her in favor of Sasuke? So what if Sasuke is too absorbed in self-destruction to ever love her back? So what if she is ordinary, with no kyuubi sealed inside her? So what if she is never going to be more than a gennin?

So what?

And fuck them anyway. She'd show them just what ordinary was.

* * *

7. 

At sixteen, her reputation has slid considerably.

She picks fights (which she often doesn't win) and she skips class (which are important and she knows on some level that she should probably attend but doesn't anyway). She is moody (permanent PMS, Naruto snipes at her before she thumps him in the shoulder) and 'unapproachable'; her parents words, not hers. But it pleases her in a way. She is so radically different from the simpering child she had been that Sakura has almost forgotten all about her.

Almost, but not quite.

She is no stronger than she had been at twelve, but she is sharper, faster, and far more cunning. She has a habit of lurking on rooftops by the river's edge, because from there she can watch her boys being sent on missions that she would never live through. Because no one thinks to invite her to send them off. Because Kakashi already has an allotted time to see her, to try to train her to pass that stupid chuunin exam, which they both know she never will. Because Naruto has proven himself a genius after all, and Sasuke-

Well, Sasuke is as he has always been; cold, hard and self-absorbed.

But they are both stronger, both jounins.

She isn't. She still hasn't even passed the chuunin exam.

When her parents investigated, had spoken to the examiners and her teachers (not Kakashi, because Kakashi is _busy_ with the other two and his own missions), they said that she wasn't applying herself.

Well fuck. They finally got it.

* * *

8. 

Her first kiss is with Naruto; funny how he seems to get those. She is sixteen and dangerous, like all sixteen-year-olds. She is full of fire and speed and chaos. With the sound of cicada ringing in her ears Naruto, back from some mission of great importance (he claims), slips around her like a familiar blanket. He holds her together as she spins out of control in his arms and kisses him like the impact of a train-wreck.

It's a little awkward because she is still taller than him; in fact, she is the tallest out of all three of them now. She is nearly (not; the man is gargantuan) as tall as Kakashi. But she bends a bit and Naruto leans a bit and somehow they fit together.

Her first kiss is bittersweet.

It's funny how things work out. Her first kiss shows her what she had never bothered to see; that Naruto is all the things that she ever has or will admire in a person and he is going to make such a man among men.

She has a queer little spin into the future as they cling to one another-him eagerly and her regretfully-and she see him tall and strong and so happy it makes her heart bleed. He's surrounded by friends and family, and has that ugly hat on his head. He looks as beautiful and mysterious as a shinobi should, as the Hokage should.

This is what he is meant to be and she is not in the picture.

Part of her wants to tell him this and part of her doesn't. Part of her wants to keep him, this goofy, beautiful boy, even though she realizes that this kiss will dispel the enchantment that has clouded his eyes for so long. Because he is not kissing the sweet twelve-year-old that he'd had a crush on, but the spiny sixteen-year-old with too-short hair.

When they part, both smiling shyly, he says: "That was weird; good, but sort of..."

"Awkward," she finishes for him softly. He smiles-and she realizes that he should always be smiling because his face isn't meant to look any other way-in relief and hug her and that is the end of it.

But he has given her her first kiss, and she promises herself that it will be enough. Despite this promise, she unconsciously measures all her future kisses by this one, and every one is be found wanting in some way.

And she loves him for it.

* * *

9. 

She is seventeen when she kisses Ino-pig.

Since the inevitable cut of her hair, Ino calls her Sakura-kun as way of insult. Instead of their friendship getting better with time, it gets worse. Sasuke is no longer the breaking point. The breaking point is Sakura her self, Sakura and her stupidity-why does she always try to be someone else?

The breaking point is the night that she sees Ino and kisses her.

It starts out as a joke. At fifteen Ino honestly mistakes the pink-haired girl for a boy, a handsome boy; a strange boy, but a boy none the less. She blushes and stammers under the quizzical emerald gaze-a shade of green that she privately believes is laughing at her-and makes a complete and utter idiot of herself.

It only gets worse when the boy (the pretty, pretty boy) says: "Ino-pig, what the hell are you _doing?_"

Ino knows then of course(and she ignores the voice in her head that corrects her, that _reminds_ her, she always knew; because there is no boy in the world with lashes like those-that would be criminal), for there is only one person in the whole wide world she allows to call her a pig. And instead of getting better, her blush gets worse and her stammer turns her furiously mute and she glares, blue eyes glacier.

So Ino pretends nothing has happened (even though she still can't talk properly to that pretty mouth twisted in a smirk and those pretty_pretty_ eyes laughing at her in abandon), while deciding on the appropriate course of retaliation.

And Ino has always known just what buttons to push.

"Well Sakura-_kun_," Ino retorts, the shadow of something malicious in her smile. "You're just looking so handsome that I got all flustered."

She triumphs-even though Sakura hasn't cried in front of her in years, she sees the makings of tears in those pretty green depths and the other girl is undone. Ino knows just where to strike a killing blow because she knows Sakura like no one else does or ever will.

Three years later, this is her punishment. She knows. Where Ino is now the good girl, the good chuunin, the good team-player-Sakura is not. Sakura is everything that Ino had ever once professed to being, and more. Sakura has grown tall; she towers over most of the boys now, and many of the men and most definitely Ino. With her height came confidence, charisma. Sakura is interesting and frightening and cool.

This girl, this bubblegum-haired green-eyed girl, is desirable in that way that only certain people can be; Ino isn't sure is she wants to be with her or just be her.

Ino only meant it as teasing, really, after the initial mockery. For Ino, adding the the suffix after Sakura's name is an endearment as well as a curse. We only hurt the ones we love, and all that.

When Sakura enters her parent's shop dressed as a boy, hair pulled back in a way that looks like a boy; hell, to the uninformed observer she could have _been_ a boy (Sakura has never filled out as she had hoped she would, not like Ino or Hinata, and remains stick-slim), Ino is startled by her appearance. She is even more startled by the little tickle of warmth it causes deep in her belly and the frantic flutter of her fickle heart in her chest.

"Sakura-kun, what a pleasant surprise," she drawls to hide-what? She asks herself; there isn't anything to hide.

"Ino-pig," the taller girl laughs. But it's not happy and a part of Ino quails because it believes that such a ringing laugh should always be joyful and not ... whatever it is that makes it a mocking sound. Ino's thoughts-as well as her retort-are lost though in the swift press of Sakura's soft lips on her own, in a bitter parody of a kiss.

And it's so fucking painful that Ino can feel her heart shredding into teeny tiny pieces as she stands.

It makes Ino cry (after Sakura has withdrawn from their impromptu embrace and seen the look on Ino's face and wavered for a second before laughing and leaving with a caustic bye Ino-_chan_), not because she hadn't wanted it (because, and Ino admits this to herself now because there is nothing to lose) but because she hadn't wanted it to be like _this_. She hadn't wanted the sentiment behind it to be this strange strained loathing, this halfhearted hatred.

She knows that this is karmic retribution for evil she had done in a past life (or possibly only this one; Ino is sort of an atheist). Ino knows that just as surely as she knows that this will be the thing that ruins any chance of anything between them.

She has managed to save a small section of her heart, and it laughs at the irony. It certainly was a boy who came between them, just not the one they'd thought.

Ino will never forgive Sakura her cruel kiss. And Sakura will never forgive herself.

* * *

10. 

She deconstructs herself at eighteen. And it is marvelous.

Kakashi (finally!) comes to her, partly concerned and partly annoyed. He finally looks at her, even though she knows he doesn't _really_ see her, and he finally wants to know what the hell is wrong with her.

She doesn't show up for training. She has a bad attitude. She doesn't _try_.

He is severe and she ignores him.

He gets angry, though you can't tell it by looking at him-he seems as calm as ever. But she can tell. She's always been able to tell. Why, if things keep up like this (he says, tone banal) he'll recommend that she be disbarred from the academy!

She laughs, because really; what else is she suppose to do?

Then she kisses him.

The way she figures it, she can get away with shit like this because she's still young enough to be allowed screw-ups and because she's just old enough to be taken seriously. The trick is balancing between the two so one is never too sure which it is; purposeful or accidental. She kisses him, and it is a way of saying 'fuck you' without words, to show him just how far he has let her slip. But he surprises her when _he_ is the one who slides his tongue into her mouth.

At eighteen she is young and resilient and she kisses her teacher and he kisses back. He kisses back because she doesn't already know enough about heartbreak, oh no, and because it's a form of subtle punishment.

This is a power-struggle. This is a reinvention. This is the final nail in the coffin of the girl she'd thought slain three years ago.

So Sakura picks up a shove and digs herself a hole that she will never be able to climb out of.

* * *

11. 

At nineteen she has sex for the first time. She has sex with Rock Lee, because she is curious and he is willing. And it's just as awful and as wonderful as she's always assumed it would be.

If someone had asked her at twelve what she thought she'd be doing at nineteen, she thinks her answer would have been something like 'married and pregnant' (though she was an appallingly naive child, and could comprehend little above the thrill of hand-holding and certainly not the aching fire the spreads from belly to loins at just the right touch) or maybe 'with Sasuke.' If someone had asked her, she definitely would not have said, sleeping with Rock Lee. Though she can't figure out why that term applies; they did anything but sleep.

But she did and she has. It is awkward and messy and astonishing all at once, though she doesn't know if she's likely to repeat the performance; it is nice enough, but nothing to write home about.

When they finish, she rolls out of the make-shift bed and shrugs on a shirt (his, it turns out-soft and olive, and far too large for her; it falls nearly to her knees because Lee is the only man she knows besides Kakashi that has that kind of height on her, the frigging giants-and she takes it with her when she leaves and Lee never gets it back), and tells the dark-eyed youth to get out while he can.

"Go be with someone who loves you," she tells him with cool indifference. She is the personification of nineteen-apathetic and lovely. She breaks the boy's heart with a puff of breath, like the wolf in a fairytale. Little pig little pig, let me come in. Little pig little pig, I'll eat you all up.

At nineteen she has sex with Lee and afterwards, alone in her room, she feels sort of achy and hollow, like she's done something stupid-well, that's not new, but not knowing what it was she'd done to cause the feeling is-and she feels the stinging start of tears like she hasn't felt for ages. Her limbs feel weighted, lethargic, and she has a sudden desire to sleep the rest of her life away.

"So, did you have a good time?" Her teacher asks sardonically from her window ledge. She doesn't bother to ask him how he entered the locked room and the barred window, and she is so tiredtired_tired_ that she simply flops onto her mattress like a dying thing.

"Did you have fun watching, or were you just in the neighborhood?" She retorts dryly while his lean figure bends over her. They match glare for glare before he chuckles, albeit darkly.

She wants to ask him why he's here-though she thinks she has a suspicion-but she can't really bring herself to speak. Instead she watches with detached curiosity as the storm-haired boy (because he really is just a boy for all he's what? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? He's more childish, sometimes, than Naruto) pins her to the bed. He has managed to wedge himself between her legs and lies along her belly and thighs; a warm, solid weight.

It's an awkward position; he's somehow managed to prop himself up on his elbows so that there is just barely an inch of space between his chest and her abdomen. Her wrists are still captured by his large, dry hands, still pinned to the bed like pale butterflies to a board.

That's something else she's noticed about Kakashi; everything about him is dry, and cool. Like, like desert sand, or old parchment. It's not unpleasant, and she finds herself comparing this cool, dry man to the hot, wet boy that she has just left. There is little to compare.

He is not wearing his mask. She guesses that he removed it upon entering the room.

Once, when she was younger and she still believed that he was her hero (not like Sasuke-he wasn't her hero; he was her heart, her destiny, her desire), she, Naruto and Sasuke had tried in every possible manner to get him to remove that mask. They were convinced that he was hiding some horrible disfigurement, and she can remember imagining huge, fleshy fish-lips underneath that unremarkable bit of cloth. Her youthful imaginings are so far from reality that she is startled into laughter.

"What's so funny?" His breath is warm on the patch of skin just between her ear and her neck and it sends a shiver of want straight to her groin, surprising her. He does not seem to expect a reply, so she keeps her mouth shut. Sakura can feel more than see him move across her throat with soft, unhurried deliberateness. He is a line of heat, lips never quite touching skin and he leaves a trail of aching need in his wake. He is the _devil_.

For a second, she thinks that he is going to kiss the apex of her throat, and she swallows in nervous anticipation. He disappoints her (this seems to be a pattern; maybe she should look into it, she thinks) and instead moves up to hover just barely over her lips. When he speaks she can feel the individual movement of his lips shaping each word. It's pure agony, and she wonders why he didn't become head of Torture Interrogation because he certainly has the torture part down pat.

"Did he kiss you?" His voice rumbles through his chest and she can feel it in her belly, doing delightful things to her insides. Part of her finds it a little sad and a little amusing that Kakashi is managing to inflame her more with just his voice than Lee had with all his sweet, heart-felt kisses. He continues without waiting for an answer. "Did you like it?"

When he finally presses a kiss to her mouth it's off-center, on the corner of her lips, and the irony is not lost on her.

"Did he make you cum?" He asks, contemptuous. She knows he is being deliberately crass to offend her, though she can only guess why. He kisses her jaw. Her collarbone. Her exposed sternum. "Did you enjoy fucking your little green man?"

Kakashi pulls himself up a bit, and switches so that his left hand is holding both of her wrists above her head and his right is free. When he kisses her, he bites her bottom lip. Then he bites her shoulder, exposed by his free hand.

"Why are you even asking?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

She pauses, calculating if she'll get a response and knowing that she won't. "And if I did?"

He is speaking in tongues against her skin; everything he says is covered in a layer of meaning upon meaning. She is not a master by any means and is lost in this foreign language. His chin grazes her chest, and she can tell he hasn't shaved for a few days. He kisses the junction of her shoulders and neck, using tongue and teeth liberally.

"It bothers you, doesn't it?" She asks suddenly, and it's like a light has gone on in her head. He is still working on that stretch of flesh on her throat and doesn't answer her. She gasps at a particularly hard nip. So she answers herself. "It does. The idea bothers you."

He pulls back and gives her that inscrutable look that he reserves for when one of his charges was being monumentally stupid, left hand still holding her wrist, right hand kneading the curve of her hip. She feels a spark of anger flicker in her gut and just as it reaches her eyes his grin becomes darkly puckish.

His kiss crashes into her like the wave of a tsunami and she lets herself drown.

* * *

12. 

She is twenty and jaded. She's gotten use to being the oldest gennin of the village, and the jokes don't hurt as much anymore.

She helps her mother in her garden, instead. They plant tomatoes and asparagus, and she helps her mother place them under large glass bell-shaped jars. Her mother (pleased that her troublesome child seems to be calming down) delights in explaining why they place the seedlings under these glass domes.

The jars protect against cold, bleak and windy weather, and most insects, to hasten maturity. Really, it's quite good for the seedling.

It's good for the plant to be isolated like this because then it doesn't have to compete with anything else, really. It's good because it's self-contained; it's its own environment. It's a miniature greenhouse.

What if the plant doesn't like it? She asks. Why not let the seedling weather it out? Her mother titters at the silly question.

As she listens to her mother, she watches a butterfly caught underneath one of the jars flutter stupidly against the unyielding glass. She feels a connection to the insect and laughs, but doesn't tell her mother why when she asks.

* * *

13. 

She's grown her hair out again, at twenty-one. It just dusts the top of her shoulders, rose-hued and soft. Like her hair, she too has mellowed a bit from her wild teenage years, even Naruto has commented on it.

And she sees that being mellow and being a pushover are two different things. It's okay to be laidback. She feels more at home in her skin, even if the fit is still a little tight in some places and a little loose in others. And again, she thinks that isn't such a bad thing because that means she still has room to grow.

Emotionally, not physically thank god. She is already tall enough as it is.

Rock Lee, bless his heart, still believes he loves her despite everything she's done to him. And she can't really bring herself to dissuade him the way she knows she should. It feels nice to have someone uncomplicated just love her. Even though Naruto teases him mercilessly and flirts with her shamelessly in the other boy's presence. Lee takes it all in stride.

Lee is one of the good men, and it makes her feel horrible that she can't find it in her misshapen soul to care about him the way she should, the way he deserves. She still can't believe that he has forgiven her so easily.

Forgiveness has always been something a little foreign to her.

Her hair has grown out, and on a Monday Kakashi runs his hand through her bright locks and tells her he likes it longer; that it suits her.

She shows up on Tuesday with a shorn head, hair electric pink and curling around her temples.

"You wear your hair short because you don't want to get involved with taking care of it," he accuses her.

"You wear your mask because you don't want to bother with shaving," she retorts acidly.

Standing toe to toe, and nearly eye to eye, the double meaning does not escape either of them.

* * *

14. 

When she turns twenty-five, everyone says she's lost her mind.

She leaves the city that housed her for her entire life and disappears without a trace into the woods beyond. She doesn't leave a trail of bread crumbs; maybe, Naruto thinks, they were all gobbled up.

Naruto (even though he believes he's far too old for tears) wakes up each morning with the sticky residue of tears on his face for a full month after she vanishes.

The child in him is at war with the adult. The child wants to rage and tantrum and find _someone_ to blame for this loss of a person he loves, because there has to be a reason. The adult tells him that she has made her choice, selfish as it is, and that if she left without a word than this is probably how she wants it. The adult tells him there is no one to blame.

So he blames Sasuke anyway. And Kakashi, just for good measure. Because Sasuke should have loved her, should have kept her here with them instead of being a stupid idiot and not seeing just how good he could have it. Because Kakashi was suppose to take care of her and instead just read those stupid fucking books of his and didn't do anything. Now she's gone to fuck-knows-where and he doesn't know if he'll ever see her again. In the early days, he gets drunk on more than one occasion before going to stand below his former teacher's apartment and roar drunken obscenities.

Sasuke is puzzled by his sudden antagonism and tells him: "So what if she left? It's not like she was all that special, anyway."

Now, Naruto knows that this is just the dark-haired youth's way of dealing because even if he never loved Sakura like she wanted she is still important to him and she has left him without a word. He wants to hurt her but can't find her to hurt her, so he hurts the next person in line. This is usually Naruto, oddly enough. Naruto knows this because he has matured, despite rumors to the contrary.

This doesn't stop Naruto from giving his friend a black-eye for being a fucking _moron_.

When he asks her parents if they have any idea where she could have gone, they are quiet and strangely uncooperative. Naruto has always thought that parents would risk life and limb for their child, like Iruka-sensei had for him, and being the forthright youth that he is he asks them flat out why the _fuck_ they are sitting on their goddamn hands while their daughter could be in trouble out there.

Sakura's father gets weepy and leaves the room. It is Sakura's mother who answers him.

"She wasn't happy here. We couldn't make her happy, so she left. We want her to be happy, and if that means not coming back than we can live with it."

Well, he bloodywell _can't_.

To him it's simple. Naruto doesn't care if she left because she was unhappy; that is her own damn fault. If she was unhappy she should have told him so he could have helped her fix it. Then he'd make her buy him ramen and they'd both be happy.

It is her own goddamn fault, but he is her friend and he would, _will_, help her whether she wants it or not.

That's what a friend _does_. He swears to himself when he sees her again he'll smack that idea firmly into her head.

But Sakura is as evanescent as her namesake in June, and she seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. No one tries to look for her. Not her parents (who are even slightly relieved and feel horrible because of it) and not the boy she had loved for so long and who had never given her the time of day; not her teacher who had taught her the meaning of a broken heart or the green-clad boy whose heart she'd broken.

No one looks for her except one boy, blond and stubborn and ultimately her friend (despite everything, because that's what a friend is) and he searches without knowing where to look.

(After the first month he doesn't wake up with tears on his face again, but six years later he collapses into muffled sobs at the sold sign hanging from her old apartment window. No one knows why because they've all but forgotten about the girl who left them behind like she'd been left behind. Naruto stops searching that night and gets more inebriated than he has in five years. Sasuke finds him passed out in the her apartment's doorway. Neither of them speak about it, but every now and then Naruto still finds himself lookng into the crowds for a glimpse of cherryblossom tresses.)

No one else looks for her because-in reality-she disappeared long ago. And no one knows how to find the woman replacing her.

* * *

15. 

She is thirty when he finds her.

It is completely by accident. He knows he wouldn't have found her if he'd been looking (sort of like a watched kettle never boils and it's always in the last place you look), and he knows the reverse is true; if she hadn't wanted to be found, she wouldn't have let him find her. Though she had never been the strongest or the fast or the most talented, she had always known how to disappear in a crowd.

She is sitting on a pier. And though she has changed, it is unmistakably her.

Her hair is long again but pale this time, white with the faintest shadow of pink; the color of clouds just after dawn. A skirt is hiked up past her knees, and she swings her long legs in child-like abandon over the glimmering blue water of the ocean stretched out beneath her feet. She looks older than he feels-even with his grey mop. She is such a mix of familiar and not that he is more than a little blindsided.

He sees sandals sitting by her hip and wonders vaguely jealous who she might be waiting for, who she might have privileged with her secret inner life now. He thinks that maybe once, a long, long time ago, it might have been him. The voice in his head feeds him false hope and tells him that it might even be him now; Sakura was always sort of cagey that way. Distantly he remembers another time when she was twenty-something and sitting on a pier like this, but for who she was waiting for he forgets.

(This is a blatant lie; he remembers perfectly well-she is twenty-two and vibrant and spiteful, and she is waiting for that caterpillar-browed boy of Gai's because even though she broke his heart three years before-and most likely would again-he still forgives her and loves her more for it, if possible. He'd seen her in town and followed her (already aware of the date from something she'd mentioned a day or so earlier) to a jetty edging out into the lake. She's wearing a long sunshine-colored sundress with a back panel of grey mesh that wraps around to her stomach, giving a delectable glimpse of belly, but retaining a halter of the original yellow material to cover her breast, and a row of buttons all the way up the front, from hemline to collar. He remembers pushing her on her back in the long summer grass and undoing those little grey buttons one-by-one. He remembers watching with a dry mouth and a jealous heart, as inch by inch, the smooth white flesh of her thighs is revealed under his fingers).

This sort of reminds him of then-but now she is wearing a white blouse that clings in a rather sinful way (he notices and tells himself it's normal and any man would) and a skirt that pools around her golden upper thighs, showing that she has been rather hedonistic with the sun. Back when he knew her, she was moonlight pale. Suddenly he wonders if he ever really knew her at all.

"Why did you leave?" he asks uneasily, both angry and not. He is bewildered. And he's not entirely sure if he wants an answer to the question that has plagued him for five years.

She shrugs and tilts her head back to look up at him. Her eyes are still jade-green, and they seem more at home in her face now. In place of the headband she once wore so proudly and left behind so easily (which, incidentally, was in his apartment, and-even more incidentally-is now tucked away in his chest of drawers, out of sight but never out of mind) she's cut her hair in a short fringe across her brow, and it looks good. She's finally grown into her face, which had always been so much older than the rest of her. From the position he's standing in he can see down the gold line of her throat where it disappears into the soft mound of her blouse-covered breasts and he feels the stirring of something agonizingly familiar in his belly. He shifts agitatedly. Her next words kill him a little.

"I was bored," she replies carelessly. Some pale hair is blown across the mouth he'd kissed so many times so many years ago, and she pulls it back impatiently. He has an impulse to grab her wrist and just hold her still so he can look at her. The ache of her leaving is back again full force; it's as if not a day has passed since he'd learned of her departure. It's a mixture of anger and guilt and longing and something else he will never name. "And it seemed like the thing to do at the time."

* * *

16. 

At thirty-five she returns to her home.

A decade has passed since she left, and nothing has changed. Only everything has. Her parents are dead-immaturely, in a boating accident. The Hokage, and the villagers, sent their condolences. She wept for three days straight before she drying her eyes and arranging for the funeral. Ino-pig is a Jounin. Naruto and Sasuke ANBU both, and still in that never ending competition of one-upmanship (why is it men never grow out of belching contests she wonders as they laze by the lake and ply themselves with sake).

Neij and Kiba are dead and Hinata a widow; Sakura thinks the grief suits her, makes her at once both stronger and more lovely. Lee is a teacher, and well loved by students and peers alike (as he should be and her guilt is assuaged a little). Kakashi is Kakashi, still the scarecrow as ever with his mop of chalky hair and his black mask and those silly comics, only now he has a new set of gennin brats to whip into shape (all boys and all eerily like a certain blond ANBU she knows), and she-

She opens a bookshop.

It's taken her five years and three decades to do this, but she finally puts away the kunai and the garrotes and the poisons and the masks, and she becomes just another woman. She becomes something that is both ordinary and not; she becomes her own person. She will not deal in mysteries and anguish and politics anymore, nor the joys of being a shinobi.

Instead she opens a book store (every morning she has a cup of black coffee and throws open the shutters and breathes in the scent of paper; sharp, old and faintly musty, and she loves it) and she makes new friends and re-makes old ones. She does not get married. Instead she keeps her hair long and puts it in a braid, with ribbons and other frippery (after her parent's funeral she is going through her mother's dresser and finds a box of clips and ties. She put them aside and later that day they found themselves on her dressing table).

She lives in her parent's house, but she doesn't tend the garden as her mother did and within a year it is a wild land of cabbage roses and begonia and blackberries and flying things. Naruto will often find her with a book and a cup of tea (and always with an extra cup waiting for him) in a hammock she's hung between the peach trees.

(Right where her father had once hung a plank swing for her third birthday. The very next morning she'd fallen off and bashed her forehead on a root. Her mother made her father take it down until she was older. By the time she was older, she'd forgotten the swing and when her father asked her when she wanted him to hang it back up, her blank look answered him and he didn't mention it again.)

She takes Sasuke for breakfast and makes him laugh with caustic observations of their fellow patrons and pays for both meals, and cheers on Lee during his training demonstrations.

(Afterwards she extends an open-ended invitation for him to come and see her at home anytime, which she knows he'll never take up. It makes her sad and impulsively she kisses his cheek (she still can make him blush beet-red despite his being thirty-five and experienced now) and squeezes his hand with a promise to come and see his next class. She keeps her promise.)

She sends flowers to Ino as an apology but never follows up on them.

(But when she sees Ino-pig on the street next, Ino gives her a smile and a nod, and a part of her heart lifts a little, even though she knows that things will never be right between them.)

She has lunch with Naruto and he slaps her upside the head and forgives her, and she takes Hinata to see a movie, because the woman really must get out more. And when Hinata doesn't have the courage to go out into the solicitous crowds she keeps her company at home and plays with Hinata's child, whispering into those perfect shell-like ear all the fairy tales she's ever heard, and she's heard millions.

She has dinner with Kakashi and finally forgives him.

("I forgive you," she says. "For what?" he asks. She smiles and takes a sip of water and never answers him.)

She-

She's grown her hair just a little past her shoulders and she's finally happy.

* * *


End file.
